This is a Shaggy Dog story about my Mac Air. I have been doing some Sakai coding lately (adding LTI to Melete) so I have been carrying both my MacBook Pro and MacAir in my backpack this week. The MBP is just *so much faster* when doing big stuff that it was worth carrying around two laptops. So my backpack weighs differently than usual this week.
\nThis is a short and stressful week – My SI539 Assignment 10 (true to form) missed a few essential steps at the beginning so I had a lot to do in lab Tuesday night running around – figuring our how students got confused from my instructions and figuring about how to un-confuse things for the whole class as quickly as possible. I foolishly sent out some code and by mistake sent out a partial answer key. And I did not have slides ready for Wednesday morning’s lecture (10 short hours away) – so I wanted to get out of lab on time – but I need to stay.
\nAll in all Tuesday evening was pretty frazzling. So when I put my Mac Air laptop down in the third row working with one student and then ran off to help several other students – I quickly forgot about the laptop. As folks got a little caught up – and the last bus was leaving the room started clearing out. I rushed to the front grabbed the backpack – got dressed and took off. The backpack *felt* pretty good. It was heavy and fled about right. Of course the Air is so light – weight is a *bad* way to judge whether or not you have what you need.
\nOf course I left the Air sitting on a desk in the third row.
\nAbout 20 minutes later cruising downthe highway – I get a e-mail on my iPhone from Lisa – the last student left in the lab – telling me that I left my laptop! Of course! I quickly told her to grab it and bring it to class – but she never got the message.
\nShe was unable to decide whether to take it or not – she thought if she took it – I would be rushing back and it would be gone – if she did not take it – of course that is a a “not in possession of a known person” problem.
\nI decided not to turn around since I was 1\/3 of the way home and it was 11PM and I had to be back at 7AM anyways for the next day’s lecture – I figure that either Lisa took the laptop or ti would be there at the crack of dawn when I got in.
\nOf course between 11PM and 7AM I had to do some slide preparation. Here is where I lucked out – I had done a full time machine backup at 6AM that very same day. I plugged the Time Machine disk into my MacBook pro – and Viola! I could get my partially worked on slides onto the MBP. SO I worked slides that night before going to bed at 1:30AM. Teh I got up at 5:00 AM and worked on slides some more and at 6AM I started to drive back to UM.
\nUp to this point – no mail from Lisa – so it was “rush into the lab” and hunt for the Laptop. The library was not open until 8AM. So I waited until it opened and rushed in (with the 2 other 8AM library patrons) and rushed up to the lab.
\nOf course – no laptop. Not so good.
\nI figured – not much could be done – so I pulled out my MacBook and started finishing the last 15 slides or so aiming for the 9AM lecture. I sat alone in the lab working on slides in the partial darkness for about 25 minutes.
\nThen the door opened and the Janitor popped in with a Vacuum cleaner. He says, “Sorry – usually there is no one here at this time in the morning – I hope I don’t bother you.” I said, “Don’t worry – I am only here because I am depressed because I stupidly left my laptop here last night and it is not here.”.
\nHe said, “That’s funny – I found a laptop here last night. The guy who is missing the laptop must be pretty bummed – it is one of those fancy Apple ones and it has a bunch of stickers on it.”
\nSo I said “Where would the laptop be now?” He said he gives that kind of stuff to his boss – and if I hurry down to the front desk – they might have not turned it over to the police yet. He said the police are a little slow at 8AM.
\nI said, “Boy I am glad you had to vacuum this room this morning.” He said, “you just must have good Karma.”. I agree that it never hurts to have a bit of spare Karma around for situations just like this.
\nSo I thank him profusely and rush down to the front desk. There is my pride and joy on the back counter – I tell them that it is mine. They ask me to identify it – Duh – they were kidding. Their tech support guy had looked around on the desktop and realized it was my computer. So with a flash of my UM id, I had my baby back! And it was still 8:20 – time enough to get a $2.00 latte, knock out 5-6 more slides and make lecture at 9:10.
\nAt lecture – I ran into Lisa and she shared with me that she just could not decide if she should have taken it or not. I told her that I generally prefer “in possession of a known human” versus “sitting on a desk in the open” any time.
\nAfter lecture I caught up on my e-mail and had a nice message from the library staff telling me they had my laptop. Since I had already picked it up – I just sent a nice thank you note.
\nAll is well that ends well. Maybe I should put a password on the system. Hmmm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a Shaggy Dog story about my Mac Air. I have been doing some Sakai coding lately (adding LTI to Melete) so I have been carrying both my MacBook Pro and MacAir in my backpack this week. The MBP is just *so much faster* when doing big stuff that it was worth carrying around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2684,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions\/2684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}